Comparing “cosmopolitanism” : taste, nation and global culture in Finland and the UK

This paper adds a comparative perspective to the study of taste, cosmopolitanism and social organisation. Drawing on material provided by two similar projects in the UK and Finland it explores the relationships between national and cosmopolitan taste cultures. Whilst there have been some recent attempts to study taste in a comparative perspective, the weight of sociological inquiry into taste is focussed on specific national spaces, including the France of Bourdieu’s (1984) seminal contribution. This tendency persists even as the production and circulation of culture is increasingly accepted as global. Global culture is assumed to be the driver of cosmopolitan ways of being, but is also interpreted as a threat to distinct national cultures. Studies of taste provide an empirical setting where the lived experience of global culture and the ambiguities of cosmopolitanism can be observed. Based on interviews and focus group discussions from the UK and Finland, the paper broadly concurs with those critics who see cosmopolitanism in the context of the maintenance of privileged political or symbolic positions of classes/status groups

Counter-talk as symbolic boundary drawing : Challenging legitimate cultural practices in individual and focus group interviews in the lower regions of social space

In qualitative interviews, challenges such as deviations from the topic, interruptions, silences or counter-questions are inevitable. It is debatable whether the researcher should try to alleviate them or consider them as important indicators of power relations. In this methodological article, we adopt the latter view and examine the episodes of counter-talk that emerge in qualitative interviews on cultural practices among underprivileged popular classes by drawing on 49 individual and focus group interviews conducted in the highly egalitarian context of Finland. Our main aim is to demonstrate how counter-talk emerging in interview situations could be fruitfully analysed as moral boundary drawing. We identify three types of counter-talk: resisting the situation, resisting the topic, and resisting the interviewer. While the first type unites many of the typical challenges inherent to qualitative interviewing in general (silences, deviations from the topic and so forth), the second one shows that explicit taste distinctions are an important feature of counter-talk, yet the interviewees mostly discuss them as something belonging to the personal sphere. Finally, the third type reveals how the strongest counter-talk and clearest moral boundary stemmed from the interviewees' attitudes towards the interviewer herself. We argue that counter-talk in general should be given more importance as a key element of the qualitative interview. We demonstrate that all three types of counter-talk are crucial to properly understanding the power relations and moral boundaries present in qualitative interviews and that cultural practices are a particularly good topic to tease them out.Peer reviewe

Analysing the ways of participating in interview settings : young people’s identity performances and social class in focus groups

Critical discussions on the focus group method have highlighted the importance of considering the forms of interaction generated in groups. In this empirical paper we argue that these forms of interaction are intimately linked to the ways participants interpret the study setting, and these interpretations are likely to differ significantly depending on participants' social backgrounds. In the light of our data consisting of 18 focus groups with 15-year-old school pupils from both affluent and deprived neighbourhoods of Helsinki discussing film clips about young people drinking alcohol, we ask what kinds of modes of participation are mobilised in focus group discussions in order to mark the social position of participants. We further analyse these modes in relation to situated identity performances, arguing that contextual factors of the study setting become especially important to consider when researching vulnerable groups and heterogeneous populations. The analysis yields three modes of participation: these are active/engaged, resistant/passive and dominant/transformative. We argue that these modes can be viewed as actively taken positions that reveal what kinds of identities and competences participants are able and willing to mobilise in the study setting, and that recognising these modes is important in all interview settings.Peer reviewe

Suomalainen kulttuuriosallistuminen ja eriarvoisuus: ei-osallistujien jäljillä

Finnish society is often considered culturally homogeneous, and an aura of middle-class spirit is claimed to label the Finns’ cultural taste and cultural participation. However, it is a well-demonstrated fact that both are intrinsically linked to structural factors like income and social status. The aim of this article is to figure out how Finnish cultural non-participation patterns are distributed in the population and to explore how the leisure time of the non-participants of (highbrow) culture is constructed. Data, a nationally representative survey (n=1388) and household follow-up interviews conducted with its participants (n=28) will be drawn from the research project. The article shows that there are indeed socially motivated differences in cultural participation practices but that cultural non-participation is not necessarily linked to passivity in other spheres of life

Bättre folk, bättre smak? : Suomenruotsalaisten maku ja kulttuuripääoma

The aim of my thesis, which consists of five original articles and a summarizing chapter, is to study the identity, lifestyle and cultural taste of the Finnish Swedes, i.e. the Swedish-speaking language minority in Finland, from a qualitative point of view. The Finnish Swedes are a somewhat special minority, first of all because of their wide-ranging language rights guaranteed by the constitution, and secondly because of the common image that Finnish Swedes represent a more legitimate or better lifestyle and taste than the Finnish-Speaking Finns. This conception is corroborated by the fact that, in comparison to the language majority, the Swedish-speakers have better health, employment, income and so on according to a number of quantitative studies. My research data is composed of twenty-six focus group interviews conducted among a geographically and socio-economically wide range of Swedish-speaking Finns. Group sizes ranged from 3 to 11 people. In the interviews, culture was approached through a framework of seven topics: music, cinema, television, arts, reading, eating and clothing. In each focus group interview, two subfields of culture were discussed along with a short section about cultural events and participation and definitions on good and bad taste. After discussing culture and taste, there was a final discussion on the Finnish Swede identity. The main theoretical framework of my thesis comes from Pierre Bourdieu (1979) and his followers: I am asking whether the status of being a Swedish-speaker can be used as a means of distinction. The main research questions are the following: (1) How does the Swedish-speaking minority look studied in the light of extensive qualitative data and in a framework of lifestyle and taste? (2) What kind of differences in lifestyle, taste and linguistic identity are there between different Finnish Swedes and how do those connect with socio-economical position, place of residence or age? I also ask how belonging to the language minority might work as a tool for cultural distinction and how different Swedish-speaking groups take use of it. My main research question is (3) whether mother tongue is a remarkable factor of lifestyle or cultural taste in contemporary Finland.Suomenruotsalaista elämäntyyliä etsimässä Suomenruotsalaisiin liittyy sitkeä myytti paremmasta tai menestyksekkäämmästä elämästä kuin valtaväestöllä. Maailmanlaajuisesti erityistä kielivähemmistöämme on tutkittu lukuisten tilastotutkimusten voimin, mutta millainen kuva suomenruotsalaisesta elämäntyylistä muodostuu laadullisin menetelmin? Suomenruotsalaista makua ja elämäntyyliä kartoittava artikkeliväitöskirjani koostuu viidestä tieteellisestä artikkelista sekä yhteenvetoluvusta. Tutkimusaineistoni koostuu 26 ryhmähaastattelusta, jotka kattavat maantieteellisesti ja sosioekonomisesti laajan skaalan erilaisia ruotsinkielisiä. Haastatteluissa kulttuuria lähestyttiin seitsemän kulttuurialueen (musiikki, elokuvat, TV, taide, lukeminen, syöminen ja pukeutuminen) kautta. Jokaisessa ryhmässä käsiteltiin kahta kulttuurinaluetta sekä lisäksi erilaisissa kulttuuritapahtumissa käymistä ja hyvän ja huonon maun määritelmiä. Lopuksi keskusteltiin vielä suomenruotsalaisesta identiteetistä. Tutkimukseni kysyy, kuinka suomenruotsalaiset näyttäytyvät suuren haastatteluaineiston valossa elämäntyylin ja maun näkökulmasta. Entä millaisia elämäntyylin, maun ja kieli-identiteetin eroja erilaisten suomenruotsalaisten välillä on ja miten ne liittyvät sosioekonomiseen asemaan, asuinpaikkaan tai ikään? Kysyn myös, kuinka kielivähemmistöön kuuluminen voi toimia kulttuurisen eronteon välineenä ja kuinka erilaiset ruotsinkieliset ryhmät hyödyntävät sitä. Viimeinen tutkimuskysymykseni on seuraava: onko äidinkieli merkitsevä tekijä elämäntyylin tai kulttuurisen maun kannalta 2000-luvun Suomessa? Tutkimukseni mukaan suomenruotsalaisten kulttuurinen maku jäsentyy pitkälti heidän yhteiskunnallisen asemansa, asuinpaikkansa, ikänsä ja muiden vastaavien tekijöiden ympärille. Koulutetut kaupunkilaissuomenruotsalaiset poimivat sujuvasti käyttöönsä kulttuuria sekä suomen- että ruotsinkielisestä kulttuuripiiristä, maaseudun pelkkää ruotsia puhuvat suomenruotsalaiset taas ovat kaikkiaan epäaktiivisempia kulttuurin suhteen ja kuluttavat lähinnä ruotsinkielistä usein paikallista kulttuuria. Ruotsinkielinen keskiluokka erottautuu joukosta korostaessaan suomenruotsalaista identiteettiään, suomenruotsalaista kulttuuriperintöä ja ruotsin kielen puhumisen tärkeyttä käyttäen hyväkseen myyttistä mielikuvaa bättre folkista . Tutkimukseni keskeinen tulos on, että suomenruotsalaiset eivät ole kulttuurisesti yhtenäinen vähemmistö

Maurin, E. (2009), "Le peur du dèclassement: Une sociologie des récessions", Éditions du Seuil / La République des Idées, París.

Sin resume

Live or recorded? Reassessing the “Decline of the Highbrow Arts” debate using European newspaper data, 1960-2010

Recent scholarship has argued that the concept of highbrow culture is undergoing radical changes, both in content and modes of appropriation. We introduce a new layer to this debate by bringing to the fore the format of the cultural product, distinguishing between “live” cultural products (concerts, exhibitions, live shows) and “recordings” (distributable items such as books or music albums). Using culture sections of newspapers (The Guardian, Le Monde, ABC, El País, Helsingin Sanomat, Dagens Nyheter) from 1960 to 2010 (n=11,775) we ask what role the format of the cultural product plays for the highbrow/non-highbrow trajectories over time. We show that highbrow coverage faces a relative decline, mostly explained by the expanding non-highbrow arts coverage. Moreover, coverage on live events decreases, while coverage of recordings grows. This trend reflects the highbrow/non-highbrow divide, revealing that the “decline of the highbrow” phenomenon is under closer scrutiny a “decline of the highbrow live event”

El debate sobre el omnivorismo cultural. Una aproximación a nuevas tendencias en Sociología del Consumo

During the last decades, one of the most interesting debates in the field of sociology of consumption has been the issue of cultural omnivorousness, usually outlined as a critique towards Bourdieu’s classic distinction theory. As opposed to the idea of differentiation and hierarchization of lifestyles based on the acquisition of cultural capital, the advocates of cultural omnivorousness claim that the new legitimate taste of the new ruling classes is depicted by a greater breadth of cultural preferences, whose range varies from the most refined arts to others more typical of popular culture. The aim of this article is to review the cultural omnivorousness theory as well as the main trends in the debate that has helped to launch. The main critiques that the concept of cultural omnivore has received by some authors will not be overlooked.En las últimas décadas uno de los debates más interesantes en el campo de la sociología del consumo ha sido la cuestión del omnivorismo cultural, planteada generalmente como una crítica a la teoría de la distinción establecida por bourdieu en sus trabajos más clásicos. Frente a la idea de diferenciación y jerarquización de los estilos de vida basada en la adquisición de capital cultural que enunciaba este autor, los defensores del omnivorismo cultural defienden por el contrario que los gustos legítimos de las nuevas clases dominantes se caracterizan, en la actualidad, por un amplio abanico de preferencias culturales, con gustos que se extienden desde las artes más refinadas a las manifestaciones propias de subculturas populares. El objetivo de este artículo es el de realizar un repaso de la teoría del omnivorismo cultural, prestando atención a las líneas principales del debate que ha generado y las principales críticas que ha suscitado